There have been many other things. I founded the only graduate program in New England in executive coaching and ran that program after developing the curriculum and bringing together and managing the faculty (at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology). After five years, I decided to move into the Institute of Coaching at Harvard to help drive the development of its strategy of building the professional discipline through research and bringing together an association of coaches from around the world who are committed to those ideals.
I think that probably explains where I’ve been. It’s definitely my professional life–and I have a much bigger life that is even more important to me in my own family and around volunteerism within the international community and my local community, as well as playing with my grandchildren, dog, and friends. I live on the ocean, so there’s kayaking and exploring the environment, preserving the environment and many other activities that I get involved with, because life is short and life is fun.
OPPORTUNITY TO PARTNER
Bill Carrier: It’s so characteristic of you, Lew, being so involved in stewardship–and not just of the profession, but of your own life.
Lew Stern: If we only try, right?
Bill Carrier: Trying and trying again is more than half the battle. You’ve done something interesting. You’ve bridged this divide from practice into doing research. It’s been said occasionally about research that there are practitioners and professors, and never the twain shall meet. You’ve mentioned this a little bit, but please just speak more directly to how that happens for you and what has animated it.
Lew Stern: I think is a real opportunity on an international basis to do this, to build a partnership between research academicians who understand how to do research and the practitioners who have the daily data-gathering that needs to be organized. Many of them have already gathered data; they just don’t know what to do with it or have the time to do it.
It turns out that just because of personality and style and natural strengths and inclinations and all the rest of it, the people who tend to like to practice don’t have a lot of interest or patience or whatever it takes to do really good research–and yet they’re very interested, most of them, in really using their practice to understand what works. They’re looking for patterns. They want to know how they can contribute best practices with others and share the same thing and get the same thing from other practitioners.
For me, I’ve always collected data. Every time I work with a client, I gather. I always anonymize all of my data. Whenever I do assessments and the 360s and I meet with the client, every time I meet, I have very structured notes of what I did to intervene and assist the client to discover things and decide what they’re going to do, and to implement those and experiment and try those things. Then I log what worked and what didn’t work, and I keep notes of all that.
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